分类： environment

As Typhoon Dujuan makes landfall across multiple Japanese prefectures, nearly 2 million residents have been ordered to evacuate their homes, in what has become the country’s 25th typhoon of an unusually active storm season. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) initially issued an urgent warning of “imminent threat to life” across wide swathes of the country, though most severe alerts have since been downgraded. Only a small number of high-risk areas retain the most serious life danger warnings, including Oshima Town, Shinagawa Ward, Toshima Village, and Niijima Village, where level four landslide warnings remain in effect. Authorities continue to urge the public to stay vigilant and monitor updated weather advisories closely.

Packing sustained wind speeds of 130 kilometers per hour (80.8 miles per hour) with gusts reaching up to 194 km/h, the storm has already caused widespread disruption to infrastructure and daily life. More than 50,000 households across the affected regions have been left without power, while hundreds of domestic and international flights have been grounded, and all regional rail services have been suspended for safety.

The typhoon’s arrival overlapped with Japan’s five-day national holiday, forcing the cancellation of dozens of scheduled public and private events. High-profile cancellations include all Monday performances at the popular Rock in Japan music festival and the full day’s programming at the Tokyo Game Show, one of the world’s largest annual video game industry conventions. In a notable political disruption, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has delayed a high-profile trip to the United States, where she was set to meet U.S. President Donald Trump and address the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, to stay in Tokyo and oversee the government’s typhoon response.

Local emergency services have reported multiple incidents of storm-related harm. In Kanagawa Prefecture, the Yokosuka City Fire Department confirmed a woman in her 60s is missing after being swept away by floodwaters and is presumed buried by a landslide that hit her home. In neighboring Chiba Prefecture, a 50-year-old worker was rescued after being trapped while clearing debris at a landslide site. The worker fell into a dense bamboo thicket alongside heavy machinery before being extracted and transported to a local hospital for treatment. Emergency responders also received a report of a separate home in Kanagawa that was completely crushed by a landslide, though no further details on casualties have been released.

Climate scientists point to two key factors driving the intensity of this year’s Pacific storm season. This year’s powerful super El Niño event, a natural climate pattern that raises ocean surface temperatures across parts of the tropical Pacific, has created ideal conditions for storm formation and intensification. While El Niño does not have a consistent impact on the total number of typhoons that form each season, researchers note it can shift storm tracks, alter strength, and increase the likelihood of stronger storms making landfall in Japan. Beyond natural climate variability, long-term climate trends are also increasing the risk of severe storm impacts: while global climate change is not projected to increase the total number of storms globally, and may even reduce storm frequency in some regions, rising global temperatures do amplify the intensity of the typhoons that do form. Warmer ocean waters allow developing storms to absorb more energy, boosting wind speeds, while a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to far heavier rainfall and increased flood and landslide risk.

As of the latest updates, Typhoon Dujuan continues to track northward along Japan’s Pacific coast. Emergency officials say full assessments of the total damage across affected regions are not expected to be completed until Tuesday, as response teams work to reach cut-off communities and clear blocked infrastructure.

As Japan enters the final stretch of its annual typhoon season, the country’s 25th named storm of 2026, Typhoon Dujuan, has swept toward Japan’s eastern coastline, bringing destructive winds, extreme rainfall and widespread disruption to daily life and major public events just as the nation’s five-day autumn holiday gets underway.

Meteorologists tracking the storm confirm Dujuan carries sustained wind speeds of 126 kilometers per hour, with dangerous gusts that can reach up to 180 kilometers per hour. Current forecasting models project the storm will pass close to the Boso Peninsula in Chiba Prefecture, located just outside the Tokyo metropolitan area, on Monday. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has issued urgent warnings that the storm could dump record-breaking rainfall across large swathes of the country through Tuesday, urging residents in low-lying coastal zones to prepare for immediate evacuation if ordered, and stay vigilant for the risk of deadly landslides.

According to JMA projections, accumulated rainfall could reach as high as 350 millimeters in the central Tokai region, 300 millimeters across the greater Kanto region and Izu Islands, and up to 200 millimeters in the northern Tohoku region. Beyond landslide risks, the agency has flagged severe flooding in low-lying coastal and riverine areas as a major threat to public safety.

The storm’s arrival has already upended transportation networks across eastern Japan. All Nippon Airways has suspended all flight operations to and from Hachijo Island, a small popular tourist destination located south of Tokyo that is already being battered by heavy downpours and powerful winds. JR East, Japan’s largest regional rail operator, has paused multiple service lines running through Chiba Prefecture, which is home to Tokyo’s primary international gateway, Narita Airport, leaving thousands of holiday travelers stranded.

Beyond transportation disruptions, the typhoon has forced the closure of numerous popular tourist attractions across eastern Japan, and the cancellation of dozens of planned holiday events. The Rock in Japan music festival scrapped all scheduled performances for Monday, while the annual Tokyo Game Show, one of the video game industry’s biggest global conventions, canceled its full slate of Monday programming.

Even the ongoing Asian Games, hosted this year across Aichi Prefecture and the city of Nagoya in central Japan, have felt the storm’s impact. Organizers confirmed that widespread safety concerns over the approaching typhoon kept thousands of spectators away from Sunday’s official opening ceremony held at a 30,000-seat main stadium, with large sections of the venue standing visibly empty throughout the event.

One month after catastrophic floods and landslides originating from a glacial collapse on the Nepal-Tibet Himalayan border left more than 1,400 people dead and thousands more unaccounted for, an international scientific analysis has delivered a clear conclusion: human-induced climate change was a core precondition that set the deadly compound disaster in motion.

The disaster, which unfolded on August 26, began when a massive section of glacial slope broke free from Langtang Lirung, a 7,234-meter peak on Nepal’s side of the border. The ice and rock avalanche crashed into the valley below with such force that U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) sensors registered the impact as a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. The collapse unleashed torrents of meltwater that swept through border towns and villages in both Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, leveling thousands of homes, wiping out critical energy infrastructure, and leaving entire communities shattered.

Released Thursday by the international climate research collaboration World Weather Attribution, the new study identifies the event as a complex compound disaster, driven by a cascade of interconnected natural and human-influenced factors. Lead author Friederike Otto, a leading climatologist at Imperial College London, left no room for ambiguity in the research’s conclusion: “There is absolutely no doubt that human-induced climate change played a role here in the preconditioning of the disaster.”

The analysis confirms that regional temperatures in July and August this year were roughly 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, a warming directly tied to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Glaciers across the Himalayan region have already thinned by an average of half a meter annually for decades, the study notes, a steady loss that weakens existing geological fractures and increases overall slope instability. Compounding this warming trend, heavy snowfall in late 2025 produced excess meltwater in the months leading up to the August collapse, while thawing permafros further loosened the slope’s structural integrity.

Researchers also note that the 7.8-magnitude Gorkha earthquake that struck the region in 2015 may have weakened the underlying rock mass, leaving the glacial slope already predisposed to failure. While Nepali authorities have not been able to confirm the exact long-term impact of the 2015 quake on the August collapse, study co-author Walter Immerzeel, a mountain hydrologist at Utrecht University, explained that the already geologically vulnerable site was weakened first by the 2015 seismic event, then destabilized further by decades of glacial retreat and permafrost thaw driven by climate change.

“Climate change was a destabilising factor acting on a pre-existing geological predisposition,” the study concludes, emphasizing that rising temperatures were not the sole trigger, but a critical enabling condition that turned long-standing vulnerability into catastrophe.

In the wake of the disaster, Nepali officials have renewed urgent calls for global climate action, pointing out that Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet ranks among the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Nepali Prime Minister Balendra Shah is set to highlight the disaster and push for global climate justice during his first foreign policy trip, when he addresses the upcoming United Nations General Assembly in New York next week.

As climate change reshapes high-altitude ecosystems across the globe, the Hindu Kush Himalayan region – often called the world’s Third Pole – is edging closer to a dangerous ecological threshold, with accelerating glacial melt, growing glacial lake instability, and a critical gap in long-term monitoring creating cascading risks for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia, according to a landmark new report from global sustainability consultancy Systemiq.

The analysis, developed in partnership with the Integrated Mountain Initiative, and with technical input from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and India’s GB Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment, comes on the heels of catastrophic glacial outburst floods in Nepal and the Tibetan Plateau that claimed more than 1,300 lives and leveled communities and infrastructure – a stark reminder of the mounting threat posed by rapid environmental change in the world’s highest mountain range.

Researchers found that Himalayan glaciers are currently losing mass 65% faster than they did just a decade ago, a rate of decline far outpacing most scientific projections from the early 2010s. Despite this accelerating change, the report reveals a staggering gap in systematic observation: of the roughly 40,000 glaciers spread across the Himalaya-Karakoram region, only 21 are monitored in detail on a consistent, long-term basis.

This lack of data comes at a moment when the region’s physical landscape is shifting at an unprecedented pace. As glaciers retreat, they leave behind large, expanding glacial lakes contained by unstable natural dams made of rock and glacial debris. At the same time, rising global temperatures are thawing long-frozen permafrost and destabilizing steep high-mountain slopes, creating conditions that amplify the risk of connected, catastrophic hazards including outburst floods, landslides, and mudflows.

India, which holds a large portion of the Himalayan range within its borders, already bears direct witness to the scale of the threat. The report notes that while just 18% of India’s total land area falls within the Himalayan region, this zone accounts for 35% of the country’s total disaster events. In a July update to India’s parliament, the government confirmed that a 2025 scientific assessment of 189 high-priority glacial lakes in the Indian Himalayas has classified 56 of these water bodies as “very high risk” for catastrophic outburst. Currently, India’s Central Water Commission monitors 2,485 glacial lakes larger than 10 hectares across the country’s Himalayan river basins, a monitoring network that researchers say still falls far short of what is needed to mitigate risk.

The region has already seen deadly consequences of unmitigated glacial risk. In 2023, a glacial lake outburst flood in India’s northeastern state of Sikkim killed at least 70 people and destroyed critical infrastructure including roads, bridges, and major hydropower projects. Two years prior, a similar disaster in Uttarakhand claimed more than 200 lives when a massive flood swept through the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga river valleys, wiping out entire communities and hydropower facilities.

But the threat extends far beyond sudden, catastrophic flood events. The Himalayan region forms the headwaters for 10 major South Asian river systems that sustain more than 1.9 billion people across the subcontinent. ICIMOD projects that most river basins in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region will reach “peak water” – the point when glacial melt runoff hits its maximum, before declining steadily as glaciers shrink – by the middle of the 21st century, threatening long-term water and food security for hundreds of millions.

The new report puts an unprecedented economic value on the region’s natural water systems, estimating that Himalayan water underpins roughly 20% of India’s total gross domestic product, supporting major sectors including rice and wheat agriculture, tea production, hydropower generation, and religious pilgrimage tourism. What is more, the report finds that the Himalayan mountain states that bear the full risk of environmental change only capture around 5% of the total economic value generated by the region’s water resources, creating a misalignment of risk and reward that slows investment in resilience.

“The Himalayas are the Third Pole,” explained economist Lord Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. “Unlike the Arctic or Antarctic, this pole has hundreds of millions of people living directly downstream of it, depending on its resources for their lives and livelihoods. This is national and international critical infrastructure, and the ecological system that underpins it is approaching a tipping point.”

Not all drivers of glacial melt are outside the control of regional governments, the report emphasizes. Researchers estimate that roughly one-third of total Himalayan glacial melt is driven by black carbon pollution, most of which originates from brick kilns, biomass burning, and fossil fuel combustion in the densely populated Indo-Gangetic plains. Black carbon soot deposits on glacial ice and snow absorb more solar radiation, drastically accelerating melting rates. Unlike global greenhouse gas emissions that require coordinated global action, black carbon is a local and regional pollutant that can be targeted for immediate reduction by India and its neighboring countries.

“The Himalayas are approaching a tipping point, with millions of lives and livelihoods hanging in the balance,” said Arushi Chopra, Systemiq’s senior director and lead author of the report. “Glaciers are melting faster than they were a decade ago, and our ability to track these changes and prepare for hazards has not kept pace.”

To address the growing threat, the report outlines 10 priority action areas for regional governments and international partners. These range from cutting black carbon emissions and vastly expanding the network of sustained glacial monitoring to upgrading cross-border early warning systems for glacial hazards and overhauling tourism development models in the Himalayas.

One key priority is strengthening coordinated disaster preparedness, with governments pre-agreeing on response protocols – from emergency evacuation routes to infrastructure protection measures – before hazards develop. Another core recommendation is a fundamental rethink of Himalayan tourism: the report notes that the Indian Himalayan region already attracts roughly 400 million tourist visits annually, and argues that the sector should shift its focus from maximizing visitor numbers to generating economic value that stays and is reinvested in local mountain communities, rather than being exported to outside entities.

Pema Gyamtsho, director general of ICIMOD, noted that the region’s hazard profile is growing increasingly complex as the climate warms. “Glaciers are retreating, permafrost and high-mountain slopes are becoming increasingly unstable, and communities and infrastructure downstream face growing risks from complex and cascading hazards,” he explained.

Crucially, these transboundary risks do not recognize national borders, meaning no single country in the region can address the threat alone. That makes cross-border monitoring, open shared risk data, integrated early warning systems, and joint investment in climate resilience increasingly urgent – not only to save lives during catastrophic events, but to protect the long-term livelihoods and trillions of dollars in economic activity that depend on the Himalayan region’s fragile natural ecosystems.